


Virus H

by seradiss



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:53:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4672508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seradiss/pseuds/seradiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the world goes to hell, survival alone is a struggle, but the real challenge that humans face in the shadow of the zombie apocalypse is keeping their humanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Paradise Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! It's been a while and I've got a few other projects going but this idea just wouldn't leave me alone. This first chapter is a prologue written in the style of a documentary and doesn't actually address the characters at all, but I just wanted to test the waters and see if this is something people would be interested in. I have a long and complicated plot waiting in the wings if you guys decide you like this train of thought, centered around a Stucky love story and the struggle to boil down the essence of humanity that is so central to Cap canon.

The first person infected was a lab tech at Hammer Industries. Howard Stark- aging founder of Stark Industries- had just released the beta version of an extremely effective drone jet, and Justin Hammer had charged his developers to find something bigger, scarier, more deadly. What they came up with was a biochemical weapon designed to infect, destroy, and spread to easily neutralize armies or civilian populations overseas. Hammer promised a revolutionized new world of warfare.

 

The news didn’t report the sudden death of Dr. Ryan Duncan because it wasn’t news; he died in his sleep of an unknown illness. The news also didn’t report the death of his teenage intern Nancy Kawasaki nine days later, presumably caused by the same illness. Two deaths of natural causes is not news.

 

26 deaths caused by an unidentifiable disease in the proceeding two weeks was news.

 

The disease spread like wildfire, jumping from person to person with any contact. It lay dormant in a host’s body for six to eight days, infecting anyone the host touched, breathed on or even stood next to. Once the symptoms manifested, it was too late and the host was dead in less that 24 hours. Within the month more thatn 5,000 New Yorkers were dead.

 

After the first deaths, people began to flee the city, so it wasn’t long before people started dropping like flies in Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Denver. The big cities, with their high density and large populations fell first, but the smaller towns soon followed. Large cities with outbreaks were quarantined, but it wasn’t enough. Between January and May 120 million Americans fell ill and died. The US borders closed and air traffic ground to a stand-still, but that didn’t stop the disease from infecting Europe, East Asia and South America by February, and Australia, West Asia and Africa by April, spreading pandemics like flames in dry brush, leaving hundreds of millions of bodies in its wake.

 

By August, the world population had been cut in half, and Virus H as the public had named it- due to its origin in Hammer Labs- easily surpassed the Black Death as the most deadly pandemic in human history.

 

By the time snow began to fall on New York, there was no one left to sweep the streets or scrape ice from windshields. Those who survived had fled, and those who died were buried, burned, or littered the streets like macabre autumn leaves.

 

There were survivors, scattered groups of terrified humans reduced hundreds of years in social evolution in a handful of months. Some escaped The Virus because of some natural resistance in their bodies, some were lucky enough to avoid infection. Others fled to refugee camps thinking they had been spared, only to infect the population when symptoms took longer than average to manifest. It was impossible to tell why an individual was alive, yet that didn’t stop people from trying.

 

Cults and Churches sprang up during the Wave of Terror, some claiming that God was angry for various reasons- gay marriage, vaccines, glacial fracking- some claiming to be the chosen ones destined to survive and create Eden from the ashes of the old world, some worshipping the disease itself as a vengeful God. Lawyers and doctors devolved into hysterical conspiracy theorists and politicians blamed everything under the sun for the decline of the American System. No one was safe from the witch hunts that sprung up around the world, some burning ethnic groups, others LGBTQ people or religious sects; everywhere terror ruled the public consciousness, and that year, Virus H was not the only thing that killed.

 

Around the start of the New year- almost exactly a year since the first infection- movement began anew in New York. The news didn’t report it because any sense of national or international journalism had died with other social institutions such as schools and big box stores. If anyone had been in New York from August to January, they would have noticed that the piles of corpses lining the streets were surprisingly pristine. Those killed by The Virus were not decomposing.

 

As the dead began gradually to wake all over the world, the already panicked and irrational survivors lost the last sliver of hope they didn’t even realize they had been holding on to. The dead were not as they had been. The Virus had stolen their humanity along with their heartbeats.

 

Though there was no universal documentation of the rise of the dead, by the time the dead were awaking in legions rather than ones and twos, the small camps of survivors around the world could not miss nor ignore their presence.

 

New York had been the point of origin, the creche of Virus H, and it was New York that was first overrun by The Hoard.

 

The survivor camp closest to the city was the first conquest of The Hoard- a Neo-Evangelical commune calling themselves A.I.M. The members of A.I.M. were quickly overrun and assimilated into The Hoard. The mutated pathogen- likely spread through exchange of blood or saliva- did not gestate for a year in new victims. The casualties of A.I.M. were reawoken in less than 24 hours.

 

The Hoard followed the trail of survivors North-West, destroying encampments and multiplying like flies. It was unclear how they tracked survivors, by smell or sight or sixth sense, but that winter The Hoard took New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, swarming like locusts over ripe crops, leaving no breathing human behind.

 

In the shadow of The Awakening, survivor groups radicalized and polarized, leaving humanity a fragmented collection of raving fundamentalists and terrified civilians, reeling at the loss of all the things humanity never thought it would have to give up. Schools closed, stores closed, the White House declared a state of emergency, but it was the closure of the Postal Service that heralded the end of America as it had been. The Constitution decreed that each state would be responsible for the creation and enforcement of post offices, and mail had been dutifully delivered ever since, and with the death of the post office came the death of the system as a whole. All sense of unity and organization soon fell before the fear that shattered the “free world,” and the United States of America became scattered groups of nomads, hiding and praying. When the States fell, the global economy fell, and the whole world was dragged into ruins.

  
Hammer had created a new world, just as promised.


	2. Chapter One: 500 Miles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Sam have walked 500 hundred miles (and would undoubtedly walk 500 more) to get to Bucky

Steve’s heart beat fast as he and Sam neared the border, so close to freedom, a life removed from the daily warfare that was survival in New York. But Steve hadn’t come to escape, he’d come to get Bucky back. Steve would rather have Bucky than a life away from The Virus any day.

 

Bucky had been stationed overseas when Virus H began claiming lives, when the borders were closed. They hadn’t let him come home when his tour was over in November.

 

That was three months ago.

 

Steve had called him before the power went out and the cell towers went offline, so Steve knew that he had used his one free army flight to go to Canada, as close to the U.S. border as possible. Bucky had been here ever since, living in this tiny border town and waiting. Months ago they had hatched this plan to get Bucky home, but they hadn’t spoken in weeks. Steve prayed that everything was running smoothly on Bucky’s end. He would have no way of knowing if it wasn’t.

 

It had taken Sam and Steve nearly the whole three months to get from NYC to the border. With the embargo on oil from the United Arab Emirates and the reallocation of funds from the offshore drilling programs to the emergency medical programs, there were no cars on the road to hitchhike with. The security on a lot of the city walls had gone up as well, so sometimes they had to camp rather than sleep in motels or barter for beds in people's’ homes.

 

The increased security baffled and irritated Steve. What was the point of upping security now? People were either contagious or they weren’t, and there was no real way of knowing. Steve could understand the towns where a clergyman would devine which travelers to admit; the idea that Virus H was of God was, of course, ridiculous, but at least those towns followed some sort of logic. There was a method to that madness. What he couldn’t get behind were the armed militiamen stationed at some town gates. Surely they wouldn’t shoot unarmed travelers just looking for a meal and somewhere to sleep; perhaps they would turn strangers away, but Steve refused to believe that humanity had sunk low enough that Americans would kill for so little.

 

Steve stubbornly clung to his optimism about human nature, even now- people were inherently kind and generous and hate was learned and could be unlearned. Deep down though, Steve was beginning to doubt himself. Some of the scenes he’d witnessed on the long trek from NYC to the border had made him want to scream and cry and rage against the injustice of it all. Virus H ruined. It swept into people’s lives and it stole everything, and those left standing would never be the same. It hurt Steve’s bleeding heart to see the products of Virus H: the broken widows and the bitter militiamen and the confused children. They were alive, but never without a cost.

 

As Sam breathed quietly in the bushes next to him, Steve wondered what it had cost Sam, what it had cost Peggy- waiting patiently at SHIELD, 4 days walk from here- what it had cost him.

 

When Bucky came into view, Steve thought his heart might stop. Bucky strolled casually along the perimeter fence, chatting with the guard in his little booth. He looked as if he’d done this every day for weeks. Maybe he had.

 

His hair was longer than it had been for the army; now it fell on his forehead like it used to do when they were kids.

 

Steve held his breath as Sam made the signal- three sharp hoots like an owl- then paused and did it again. Bucky didn’t look up or change his expression at all, but he did wave to the guard and start walking away.

 

For a terrible moment, Steve thought he hadn’t heard the call, that he was going to bed. It hurt so much to think that he wouldn’t get to see Bucky tonight afterall. Steve wasn’t sure his heart could handle that after everything. But moments later, Bucky appeared further down the fence, out of sight of the guard. He nimbly jumped the fence and headed for the closest cover- a patch of dense, low bushes.

 

Steve could feel his heart beating in his fingers and toes as he crept silently towards where Bucky had disappeared, Sam close behind him. Bucky was so close that Steve could almost convince himself that he could smell Bucky’s old sandalwood and cedar cologne. He knew Bucky stopped wearing it in ‘98 when his father died, he knew it was impossible to smell him from so far away, but the earthy smell that was so familiar from his childhood still tingled in his nostrils and against his skin.

 

As he moved slowly forward, careful not to alert the guard, Steve wondered idly if you could still buy cologne in Canada. In the States it had become a luxury only the fabulously wealthy could afford.

 

Steve didn’t care if Bucky smelled like he hadn’t showered since he left Iraq, as long as he was solid and warm and real in Steve’s arms.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, we finally got to the actual characters! Sorry this chapter is pretty brief and not very exciting. This story is not coming as easily as I'd originally hoped and real life keeps happening, but I'm doing my best. Hopefully I'll manage to continue this story and get to more interesting bits :)


End file.
